The Snake Catcher
I bring Jeff ramen noodles. He is dying and the hospice where he is dying is on my way to work. What do you want, I asked Jeff and he said ramen noodles so I bring him ramen. Jeff is dying from almost all the types of cancer but when I first start visiting him he seems like the same old Jeff who inadvertently got me kicked out of the place we had lived together. He stole money from the office of the intentional community we lived at and then the house went on lockdown. I don’t do well with lockdown so I walked out to go to a thing and they kicked me out after that.
Jeff lived there because he didn’t have anywhere else to go. I lived there because I wanted to live with and learn from folks like Jeff who were very different from anyone I’d had an ongoing interaction with growing up. Jeff was from central Florida and liked to catch snakes with his bare hands which only ended badly three times when the snakes caught him instead. One of those times a rattlesnake bit him and he had to be airlifted to the hospital from the middle of the desert. He tells his stories with always wide eyes like he’s not sure whether to believe them himself.
When I came to visit Jeff at the hospice he had been arrested not long ago for holding up a CVS. He used a knife which was the only weapon he could afford and walked away with $90. Problem was the CVS was also the place where he got his schizophrenia medication.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Jeff?” asked the cashier.
“Just give me the money.”
The police officer that pulled up beside him making his getaway on foot said, “Hold up, Jeff.”
Jeff got out of jail because he was dying and he had no money and that made him the right kind of patient for the hospice run by the nurses. There was a beautiful, old tree in the courtyard where Jeff and I sat and talked. We didn’t have much to say to each other but we were both glad just to sit and bask in the sun and occasionally share a memory from the intentional community and sometimes he’d tell a story like about robbing the CVS.
“Stupid thing is I had someone bringing me my social security check that same day, it was a big check, and there was two women waiting at my apartment to have sex with me. I wouldn’t have had sex with the white one because she had AIDS. I guess it wouldn’t have mattered because I’m dying anyway.”
I visit Jeff once or twice a week and he seems like the same old Jeff each time, maybe in a little more pain, and then one day he is asleep and does not wake up to greet me, and the next time I visit he is dead and they ask if I want any of his stuff so I take a couple of the photographs that he cherished of his niece and nephew who are who knows where, not anywhere near here. I still have one of his old voicemails on my phone that says, “Hey, this is Jeff. Give me a call. I need to holla at ya. Love ya, brother.” His voice is soft and melodious and Southern, transfixed in the Verizon airwaves, one of the last physical vestiges of Jeffrey Maxwell Autrey.